As Shanghai prepares to host the Asian Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition in March (see page 38), the bizav industry appears to be at a pivotal point in China. The private aviation age has dawned here, but it remains a somewhat foggy dawn with reduced visibility for anyone wanting to operate business aircraft in the country.

A horrific midair collision over the Amazon jungle in 2006 was just the beginning of this travel writer's troubles. Then came five years of court battles and, finally, a conviction for supposedly dishonoring the entire nation of Brazil.

Phil Mathews wanted to be a pilot since childhood, but bad eyesight precluded that dream. Instead, after graduating from England's University of Buckingham in 1989, he began a job as a check-in agent at London's Gatwick Airport. He was hired just for summer vacation, but he wound up being promoted to flight dispatcher and manager of general operations and spending four years there.

Fractional aircraft ownership is a great American entrepreneurial idea that arguably hasn't traveled well. Fifteen years after its main proponent, NetJets, brought the concept to Europe, that company remains the only one to have achieved any lasting traction in the international markets that supposedly have a massive appetite for business aviation.

AIN Publications, Business Jet Traveler's parent company, also publishes many other magazines, including on-site air show dailies in seven countries. During my years with the firm, I have traveled all over the United States as well as to Paris, London, Geneva, Dubai, Singapore and–as of March 2012–Shanghai.

What if there were no airlines? It may sound crazy, but now-retired rogue aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan once speculated that, someday, people might look back and say, "For a short period in history, people traveled en masse in giant airplanes called 'airliners.' They only used a very few crowded runways, and traveling to and from the airports often took longer than the flight itself." In Rutan's version of the future, we would further develop the general aviation infrastructure such that people could fly on light airplanes to and from the thousands of small airports near their homes and destinations.

A Company called The Jet Business is taking aircraft sales right to billionaire main street with the launch in London of what it claims is the only retail outlet of its type. The first store in the chain opened recently at Hyde Park Corner, right at the meeting point of three exclusive neighborhoods–Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Mayfair.

Elegant and effervescent, Quebec City’s Restaurant Le Saint-Amour is where haute cuisine meets the Moulin Rouge. (Cirque du Soleil is based nearby, after all, and its members frequently dine here.) Housed in former stables reborn in 1978 as a three-story atrium, the restaurant offers one of the most impressive dining experiences in eastern Canada.